Conjoint analysis and trade-off analysis - section index

The drivers behind decisions that consumers and customers make are often hidden, sometimes even to the consumer themselves. Customers use triggers and trade-offs to select from what is on offer. Do they go for high price, high quality or low price, low quality or somewhere in between?

Conjoint analysis and trade-off techniques are methods for investigating and modelling these trade offs to understand the relative values customers place on different elements of a product or service in order to find the optimum point or sweetspot. Potential products and services are shown to customers/consumers (defined in a statistically optimised way) and the customer is asked to choose. In this way we can find out what the customer wants by looking at the actual choices the customer makes.

Introduction - What you need to know about how conjoint analysis works and principles to follow. Find out your true customer needs and values by understanding how do characterise products into attributes and levels, how to see what trade-offs are made, then use the results to predict how product developments will affect market share.

Different types or flavours - Conjoint analysis is not one method or approach, but encompasses a range of flavours from choice-based, to adaptive to more technical forms like discrete choice modelling. Each is for specific tasks and uses and some thought is needed as to which is most suitable. What is good for pharmaceutical research might not be the best solution for a consumer segmentation study for instance.

Conjoint demonstration - Live interactive illustration of how conjoint analysis works to estimate customer utilities (part-worths) and values in our now famous pizza demonstration.

Modelling demonstration - Demonstration of applying the results conjoint analysis to model market share (share of preference) in an interactive market model where you can play with different product or service make ups to produce forecasts of preference. Models are one of the key outcomes and rarely available for other forms of market research.

A brief history of conjoint analysis - Some background to the conjoint analysis covering full-profile, adaptive and methods of choice-based conjoint running up to date with menu-based approaches and configurators.

A selection of alternatives to conjoint analysis - Though powerful, conjoint is not always the most appropriate research tool and other trade-off methods like Simalto, MaxDiff, or point scoring systems might be more appropriate depending on the specific problem at hand.

International conjoint - The use of conjoint analysis in international research and the types of common issues to be faced including language obviously, but also issues with pricing and currencies and for complex B2B markets solutions such as telephone-assisted conjoint analysis.